lightning strikes

literally.

i'm quite sure that during the massive thuderstorm on friday evening, my building was struck by lightening. it was wicked bright, and scary loud, and i heard strange popping noises coming from the kitchen that i couldn't account for, all at about the same time as the whole left side of my body felt like when you accidentally place your finger across the prongs of a plug that's not quite plugged in. craaazy. anyway, this probably means that i wasn't personally struck directly by lightening, but rather just feeling the presence of the ungodly gargantuan electric field generated by all the nearby current, but it's still kindof a novelty, i suppose. and possibly somewhat safer for me.

during the same storm, two of my three tomato plants got torn right out of the dirt they were planted in. that pissed me off substantially. i guess i'm just not meant to be a gardener. i try and i try and i try, but i just can't keep my plants from dying horrible awful untimely plant deaths.

alcherio and chiara had their daughter last thursday, so he's not around this week. unfortunately, a side effect of this is that i'm not being particularly productive, which will probably result in me falling behind and getting stressed out again sometime in the next couple of weeks. i'm trying to avoid this at all costs.

i brought the helicopter in to work with me a couple days ago, and people were playing with it at lunchtime (we have a huge open atrium in the building which is pretty much ideal for it). it's kinda fun having something that everyone wants to play with. it's also fun watching them fight over it like kindergarteners (well, not really, but almost). ;) now, if i can just find a hobby shop to get proper materials, i can start making improvements, or even building one of my own from scratch...

i really want to buy a bicycle, but i have no idea where to go to buy one. even if i find a real bike shop in switzerland, i'm sure i won't be able to afford anything, but i just can't bring myself to buy a bicycle at the equivalent of target. it just feels wrong (not to mention the fact that even i can tell that they're pretty crappy bikes).

bbq on the lakeshore tonight in lieu of movienight on thursday. sounds like it should be fun.

engineering strikes again

after returning sunday from my three weeks in the states (during which i basically neglected or ignored any reasonable or rational limits on my food intake), i was reading up on nutrition and weight management a little and i stumbled across a book that avery had told me about at oxy, and it really is quite convincing. it's called "the hacker's diet" by john walker (founder of autodesk and lead developer for autoCAD). http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/www/hackdietf.html okay, so clearly, i'm a geek, and so his analytical approach automatically appeals to me on an intellectual level, but i read through the whole thing in a day, and it makes a shocking amount of sense. people just don't think to apply engineering principles for finding solutions to what are not stereotypically thought of as engineering problems.

but see, that's just it---all engineering is is just a mindset and a method for systematically solving problems. identify the problem, characterize the system (indentify the input and output parameters), and apply feedback rules, which allow you to adjust the inputs according to the output you get in order to generate the output you want. the concept is mind-numbingly simple.

just to be clear, as he says in the book, just because something is simple to describe doesn't mean that it's going to be easy to implement. but you can bet your bottom dollar that if you have a plan and a system, you stand a much better chance of finding the solution than if you are just stumbling around blindly in the dark, randomly changing semi-irrelevant things and wondering why you don't get the results you want.

anyway, despite being geeky enough to convince me, he actually does a really good job of explaining his ideas in basic language that i'm pretty sure just about anyone could comprehend. if this sounds at all interesting to you, you should definitely check it out. i'm giving it a try; and at the moment i'm maintaining an uncharacteristicly high level of optimism and choosing to believe that it might actually work.

helen is leaving us to go back to boston next week, which is sad (espcially since we haven't finished twin peaks yet, but i'll send her with copies of the rest of the series so she won't miss out completely).

enno and i are going to start looking for an apartment to split (it seems that price scales sublinearly with size, so by pooling our resources we should be able to get something better than the combination of our two separate apartments). that could be exciting. i hope we find something cool. i miss living around other people. i doubt if i'd actually want to go back to a dormitory situation, but it certainly was a really neat environment to have a large number of friends living literally within a hundred yards or so of each other. i guess what i'm trying to say is that i feel a little isolated all the way over on my side of town, far away from everything and everyone. it'll be nice to be closer to everything, and have someone to talk to on occasion.

oh, yeah, and my tomato plants survived while i was gone (rock on!). unfortunately, the bonzais were not so lucky, though...

and the most impressive thing of all: it even seems like tsa somehow forgot to break anything on this trip (knock on wood). unbelievable. hell must be freezing right now, or something. even the helicopter survived. hey, i should mention that, too.

i bought a toy rc helicopter! it's awwwwwesome. much harder to fly than it looks, but still awesome. and really light (like 50g). and (most importantly) _passively_stable_. that means that once you get the hang of adjusting it, you can put fly it somewhere, and then take your hands off the controls, and it will just hang there. absolutely incredible. so what i want to do with it is make a control board for it, and have it fly itself! that's going to kick some serious ass, if i can make it work.

and as long as i'm acting like a three-year-old bragging about his christmas presents, i suppose i should also mention that my new snowboard is wicked cool. i can't wait to use it this winter. (here's a link to the model, http://www.burton.com/burton/gear/products.asp?productID=14, mine is the 154 greenish/greyish pattern.)

hrm. for some reason, i can't think of much else to say at the moment. i should probably recap the conference at some point, but i don't feel like it right now, maybe tomorrow. i suppose for now i should probably try to get some work done... [rolls eyes]